Locally, Davidson County, Tennessee contains the cities of Oak Hill, Berry Hill, Forest Hills, and (until 2011) Lakewood. Those cities stayed independent when Nashville and Davidson County merged governments back in the 1960s.
Similarly, off the top of my head, there’s:
College Station, Texas (home of Texas A&M)
State College, Pennsylvania (home of Penn State; technically a borough, the PA town-equivalent)
Mississippi State, Mississippi (home of …; technically a census-designated place for the part of MSU not in Starkville and not an actual city)
Without looking it up, amongst others, New York contains Burnt Hills, Buffalo, Stow, Aurora, Auburn, Long Island City, Red House, Glens Falls, Maple Springs, Flushing, and/or Queens.
Our auto mechanic’s shop is in Mechanicsville, MD, but I’m pretty sure it’s not named for the shop.
There are probably a lot of oaks in Oakville. But I don’t know about hollies in Hollywood. Nor do I know if there’s a ridge in Ridge. Not sure how golden Golden Beach is, but I’ll bet there are pines at Piney Point and timbers at Tall Tiimbers. And ya gotta figure there’s love in Loveville.
Want to note that descriptive names are the second largest source of place names. The most common are places named after people. Places with Indian names and places named after other cities are 3rd and 4th, although I’m not sure what order they would be in. Of course, Indian names, if you can find the actual meaning (often you can’t), are usually in the first two categories: either the name of a person or a descriptive name. At any rate, there’s tens of thousands of places with names that mean something in English. I hope the OP isn’t expecting us to name all of them.
Also note that places named after people sometimes are also a common English word. For example, here in Oregon there’s a town named Boring and one named Drain. Both named after people.
some more interesting ones on that list and other lists linked from there:
Superior
Elk Mound
Two Rivers
Three Rivers
Three Lakes
Pound
Wayside
Little Chute
Eagle
Egg Harbor
Sturgeon Bay
Blue Mound
Junction City
Lime Ridge
Luck
Pigeon Falls
Black River Falls
Pleasant Prairie
Prairie Farm
Union Grove
Whitelaw
many towns with lake or bay in the name
And the answer to everyone’s favorite “where is he” question … Waldo
Speaking of Rocky River, OH, the other suburbs surrounding it also all have English names: Lakewood, Bay Village, Westlake, and Fairview Park. Also in the Cleveland area, off the top of my head, are Mentor, Seven Hills, Shaker Heights, and Eastlake.
There’s a part of me that suspects that suburbs are more likely to have English names than metropolises.
I agree that it is not unusual to have settlements that mean something in one’s native language. After all, a lot of the time they are founded out of whole cloth as a new settlement by a person who speaks your language and thus why not use a descriptive name.
However, place names in general are fairly conserved even given language and ethnic change. People are resistant to using a new name for a river or mountain if it already has a known name, so will tend to use a native word if they know one (with more or less accuracy in the transcription.) Given enough time, it certainly fits the spirit of the OP to exclude non-English descriptive names whose translation would be opaque to the overwhelming majority of residents.
That may have been true in other countries, but Native American names were not conserved very well by the English speaking settlers. Most of the Indian geographic names that do survive are those of geographic features; towns were only occasionally given Indian names and then many of them are named after people and not the name of any Indian village that had previously been there. In fact, I expect that many of those Indian villages may not have even had names.
At any rate, even not counting non-English descriptive names, descriptive names are still the second most source of American place names.
As far as conserving names, when the towns were small, it was not at all unusual for them to be renamed, sometimes several times. (Scranton PA, as an extreme example, had 6 or 7 names before it settled on its current name.) Some times a name change was forced on them, usually when a post office was applied for and the name was rejected because there was already a post office with that name (or a name that was too similar) in the same state or territory.
I should also note that Indian names are over-represented among large American cities, as are Spanish names and names of famous people. That is, compared with the bulk of place names. The most common way American places are named is for the first post master or the first settler.
Freedom
Liberty
Hope
Old Orchard Beach
Blue Hill
Bar Harbor
Amity
Moose River
The Forks
Unity
Wells
China
Brooks
Prospect
Old Town (which is, ironically, chartered as a city)
Auburn
Bath
Mechanic Falls
Do compound words count? If so…
Portland
Vassalboro
Fairfield
Waterville
Newport
Northport
Frenchboro
Oakland
Swanville
Thorndike
Winterport
Rockport
Rockland
Greenville
Rockwood
Brownville
Appleton
Mapleton
Springfield
Lakeville
I suppose that’s as many as I can think of at the moment.
With mention of “a place name to conjure with” in Arkansas – railways being a hobby of mine, I’ve read of the Reader Railroad in that state: a short line which continued to carry passengers, into the 1970s. It had wayside stations at hamlets marvellously named Possum Trot, and Goose Ankle.